Style and Matter, Part 2

Followup to: Style and Matter, Part 1

…great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.

–Mark Twain

To give you some insight about my website idea, it makes sense to look at the rough draft of my About page:

My name is Ian Claudius, and I’m the founder of Style and Matter. I’m thrilled that you want to learn about our community. The premises here couldn’t be any simpler:

1. Writing. Real writing, and that’s it. No news, no product releases, no pictures, no video. The internet is flooded with this content already, and separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I love the chaff too. But how often do you find a link that you would revisit a month later, like a good book? Forget a month–how about ever again? After the initial laugh, shock, or shrug, do you care anymore? Style and Matter exists to fill this void. Great writing needs a venue of its own in which to compete.

2. Discussion. Community. Great conversation belongs under the same roof. Of course, a lot of the same trends that govern content apply here. There is a lot of potential on the internet for insight and intelligent discourse, and 1000 times the potential for everything else. The difference here is that we make an effort–just as the writers and bloggers we’re talking about did. Spamming, trolling, stupidity and everything else that makes 99% of the internet unreadable is not tolerated here.

3. Competition. Here, a blogger doesn’t have to worry about his latest story being buried under the torrent of a new Apple product launch. He only has to worry about improving his craft to compete with other writers doing the same. Voting isn’t a particularly original idea. For that matter, neither are any of these premises. But they are powerful indeed, and useful for discovering art. Combine them, and you have us.

And we’d love to have you. So if you’ve read this far, read two words further: Join us.

Ugh. You could tell I believed my own bullshit. I even chose a puffy, self-important name (I’m talking about Style and Matter, not my own name, which is badass). But ironically, all the style couldn’t hide the matter: it was a Digg-clone. Sure, it was a niche, and might have done all right (like sk*rt or Sphinn), but ultimately my decision to quit before serious investment came down to this:

I’m way too proud to claim a spot on the Long Tail. I want the head. I want to be the best. Do I have the resources and innovation to really make this happen?

It took some introspection, and some prodding from Ryan Holiday (really, I mention him a lot, but it’s because I badger him with questions even more), but the answer was no. Shifting the mediocrity from one area of my life to another wasn’t going to cut it. I wasn’t going to out-Digg Digg, and I couldn’t think of a different aggregation route (like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon) or anything that similarly changed the game.

My ideas were polarized in a sense anyway. The Digg framework is really one that caters to attention deficit. My goal of quality, lasting content would never have flourished in this environment. It would have required constant micromanagement, constant steering toward an ideal that didn’t belong. For a supposedly open venue, this made even less sense. I wanted moderation, not dictatorship.

So I quit. I should’ve quit before I started, but I was too caught up in the story of the press release, rather than the one people actually listen to (or don’t care about). My persistence was also fueled by the bias of wanting to do something. Anything creative or interesting or self-empowering. I just wanted to put my talent somewhere, because I certainly wasn’t using it at work. But once that high wore off, I recognized the folly.

Lesson learned.